Hawaii got a lot of attention on the national stage this week, but most of it was disappointing news for business.

First, NBC brought the Today show to The Royal Hawaiian in Waikiki for its Monday morning show, cramming everything it could get its hands on about the Islands into a three-hour live broadcast in the middle of the night that we couldn’t watch until after sunrise.

That same day, Gov. Neil Abercrombie gave the opening address to the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems, an organization that represents more than 550 public pension funds in the United States and Canada.

So, why were either of those disappointing?

Because the images and the messages repeated the same tired clichés about our Islands: Great weather! Big waves! High housing costs! Cereal costs $6! Traffic is terrible! It’s too expensive to have a convention in Waikiki! You can’t do business in a place with nice beaches!

You get the picture.

NBC rolled out every cliché in the book for its Today show extravaganza, from yellow plumeria lei to grass skirts to dashboard hula girls. Producers spent a week with the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau flying around the Islands to film a travelogue to show to viewers, and they did a nice segment about Pearl Harbor, of course.

While the Neighbor Island scenery was a nice touch, the show still played up the kitschy tiki culture to the hilt. But, hey, maybe that’s what visitors to Hawaii want to see.

The message sent — or, rather disputed — at the pension fund conference is perhaps more disturbing for Hawaii businesses, especially those that seek to play in the national or global leagues.

Abercrombie spent a portion of his speech defending Hawaii as a serious place to do business.

It was an attempt to undo the damage done by numerous stories that have appeared online and in newspapers around the country over the past several weeks about public-sector pension fund managers opting to skip the trip to Hawaii because of how it would look to the folks back home in whatever flyover state they live in for them to travel to a beach destination.

The Associated Press reported that about 650 people attended this year’s conference at the Hawaii Convention Center, compared to 1,000 who went to the meeting in New York City last year.

It couldn’t have been the cost of attending a convention in Hawaii that got hackles up on the Mainland — the hotel rate the group paid at the Hilton Hawaiian Village Waikiki Beach Resort was 44 percent less than what it paid in New York.

A similar brouhaha erupted last year when the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was planning to hold its annual conference at the Hyatt Regency Maui Resort & Spa, drawing criticism from Republican senators who were outraged that judges would dare to meet in one of the circuit’s nine western states. Perhaps they hadn’t gotten the memo that Hawaii is a state — since 1959.

When President Barack Obama — who, as a native of these Islands, should understand better than most that Hawaii is more than just a pretty place — announced that Hawaii would host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings in 2011, business leaders rejoiced at the chance to show the world, or at least the skeptics in the United States, that this is a serious place to do business.

Yet, we let the Today show producers reinforce the old sun-and-fun notion to millions of viewers, and wait weeks for the governor to address the disparaging remarks repeated in dozens of states that think it’s shameful for pension fund managers to hold a meeting here.

APEC was supposed to erase the perception that Hawaii is only about sun, surf, sand and mai tais. Look at us, we said, we’re not just pretty, we’re good for business, too!